Despite McCain’s standard disclaimer in his press conference today that “now is not the time for partisanship,” it’s very clear that, reminiscent of the way that the Bush administration has wielded U.S. national security policy as a political weapon in a permanent negative campaign, John McCain intends to politicize and personalize the Russia-Georgia conflict as much as he can. His campaign has been relentlessly touting McCain’s personal relationship with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili — this story has McCain foreign policy adviser and former Georgia lobbyist Randy Scheunemann claiming that McCain and the Georgian president are “speaking daily throughout the crisis” — raising the very serious question of whether McCain’s bonehead straight talk is further inflaming an already tense crisis.

McCain’s response to the Russia-Georgia crisis — and the uniform response of his neoconservative war cabinet — is typical of their deeply ideological approach to foreign policy. Trapped within an outdated “great power conflict” foreign affairs framework, this ideology requires treating each and every international crisis as a potential affront to American dignity, regardless of how that particular crisis actually impacts on America’s national security interests, and going all-in with grandiose statements of principle, with little consideration of or appreciation for how those statements can and do affect events. Senator McCain’s words and behavior, and that of his advisers, suggest that a President McCain’s approach to global affairs would make us long for the deft, sensitive diplomatic touch of George W. Bush.

As Iraq has slowly emerged from years of civil war and open insurgency to stabilize at merely unacceptable levels of violence, a steady stream of war supporters have undertaken to rehabilitate their reputations by interpreting recent events as vindication of that support.

A few choice examples:

- The Washington Times’ Tony Blankley praising the Iraq war exterminating the hundreds of terrorists who “otherwise would have been plying their trade elsewhere,” ignoring the overwhelming evidence showing that the Iraq war itself was the main factor in the radicalization of foreign fighters in Iraq.

- Commentary’s Peter Wehner suggesting that giving Al Qaeda the opportunity to kill and maim thousands of Iraqis so that Iraqis would eventually reject Al Qaeda’s brutality represents a significant U.S. foreign policy victory.

- The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt trying to recast the WMD debate through selective editing of the Senate report on pre-war intelligence.

- And, of course, Doug Feith, who can’t order dinner without lying erring six times, blaming the CIA for not producing good enough intel for Feith to cook.

These people are up to their elbows in blood over the Iraq war, and thus aren’t above resorting to the most transparent dishonesty in order to present the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a success.

Christopher Hitchens certainly belongs to this group, and he recently offered this instant classic of the genre:

I think we should be glad that the luridly sadistic and aggressive Saddam Hussein regime is no longer in power to be the beneficiary of the rise in oil prices and thus able to share its wealth with the terrorists, crooks, and demagogues on its secret payroll.

It takes a very, shall we say, baroque intellectual sensibility to defend the Iraq war on the grounds that it prevented Saddam Hussein from profiting from skyrocketing oil prices that have resulted from the war to remove Saddam Hussein.

Given how many reputations of important, influential people are tied to the Iraq war, we should expect a lot more of this sort of thing. Thus it’s important to hold the line and insist that, while it’s certainly good news that we seem for the moment to have averted an even worse disaster, the fact that Iraq is no longer a killing field free-for-all does not vindicate the decision to invade. Given all that’s occurred in the last five years, the staggering human and financial costs, there is no defensible moral or strategic calculus by which the Iraq war can be judged to have been a policy success.